Featured Articles: Tuttle Farm; Trains & Farms; Mini Cows

“According to eyewitness accounts, John Tuttle was shipwrecked off the Maine coast before arriving at his land grant, which boasted a mature stand of white pine trees. He cut them down and farmed around the stumps, starting what would become 250 years’ worth of subsistence farming by Tuttles.”

“The Tuttle Farm of Dover, New Hampshire, [was] the oldest continually operating family farm in the United States, having passed down through 11 generations from father to son since the 1630’s when John Tuttle arrived in the New World bearing a land grant from King Charles II.”

“The emergence of trains, Cronon argues, transformed the U.S. landscape. He shows that the development of Chicago as the central U.S. rail hub, the “gateway to the West,” facilitated the conversion of the Midwestern prairie ecosystem into today’s Farm Belt. Without a thriving market for farm products in Chicago, and the means for cheaply getting them there provided by the rails, it would not have made economic sense to plow up the prairie and plant it with grain.”

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